Amazon’s Servers Go Down, and The Internet Comes to a Halt

On Sunday morning we were reminded that, contrary to current cosmological theory, the world really revolves around an inconspicuous data center in Virginia.

A server fault in an Amazon data center in Virginia earlier this morning took down many Amazon services and many popular websites. Amazon Web Services is the Amazon division responsible for hosting web and mobile apps. It's distributed across multiple locations, and supports websites all over the world.

And it crashed hard on Sunday. There are numerous reports on Twitter that a surprising number of web services ranging from Netflix to Medium and Nest to Buffer and Pocket all became unavailable on Sunday morning.

The Sunday morning crash also shut down Echo, Amazon Instant Video, the retail functions of Amazon.com, IMDb, Createspace, Mayday, and the Kindle Store were all affected.

Len Edgerly of The Kindle Chronicles reported several of the downed services on Twitter this morning. He said that he couldn't order a Fire tablet, or use his Fire Stick to stream video (curiously, I had no trouble with Amazon Video during that period).

For the most part only customers in the Northeastern US were affected, but I also have reports from Germany that the Kindle Store on Amazon.de was down, and so was Createspace. Another German Amazon customer reported that her Fire Stick stopped functioning at about the same time.

According to The Independent, other affected services include Tinder, Product Hunt, SocialFlow, GroupMe, Viber, and Mediacom.

Far more services were affected in the Sunday morning crash than the last time AWS crashed, in 2013. Techcrunch reported at the time that the crash took IFTTT, AirBnB, Vine, Netflix, and Instagram offline.

That 2013 crash also happened on a Sunday, and it also involved an Amazon data center in Virginia. That crash lasted less than two hours before most of the services were back online.

Today's crash ran past the four-hour mark before Amazon's services were restored, and according to the AWS Health Dashboard the system is operating normally again.

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Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader:"I've been into reading ebooks since forever, but I only got my first ereader in July 2007. Everything quickly spiraled out of control from there. Before I started this blog in January 2010 I covered ebooks, ebook readers, and digital publishing for about 2 years as a part of MobileRead Forums. It's a great community, and being a member is a joy. But I thought I could make something out of how I covered the news for MobileRead, so I started this blog."

Here in Albuquerque, I had trouble with YouTube, though I could take YT urls I subscribe to (they send me “hey, new content!” emails) and I put them in my YouTube downloader and that worked okay. But I couldn’t go into the site and thumbs up anyone. Twitter and Local Yelp worked okay, but other sites didn’t, so while I worried that my just updated I.E. 11 wasn’t liking some sites, I was also thinking it was maybe some solar influence (there was a minor solar storm effecting Earth) or something along that line. Here it is 4:09pm mountain time and everything is working, whew!

I post bargain books every morning either on my blog or on a FB page for such and as I was doing my posts, there were no actual buy buttons on the book pages at Amazon! (I’m in Texas). By the time I finished with the post, the buy buttons were back. First comment on the book? “There’s no buy buttons.” I looked. Yup, gone. I went to do a post on being patient with the buy buttons and…they were back.

The author’s dashboard was also down for a couple of hours and another author reported that she was unable to mail .mobi files via Amazon’s service to kindles.